I love Science.  The keys, the quirks, and especially the ideas that drive our culture.  They are everywhere.  My favorite part of science is the physics that drive much of our world.  We are still endeavoring to understand the world and it’s inner workings.  But what does that take? E.O. Wilson, famous biologist and notable scientist, believes that it takes creativity.

much of science seems to be dying off.  After all, haven’t we discovered everything that needs to be invented?  Whether or not that is true, Wilson seems to believe that this shouldn’t matter:

There will come a time, of course, when the exponential growth of discovery and knowledge, which actually began in the 1600s, has to peak and level off, but that’s not going to matter to you. The revolution is going to continue for at least several more decades. It’ll render the human condition radically different from what it is today.

Instead, young scientists need to still be compelled to keep looking, for the need to search naturally exists within one’s genes.

I found out that in science and all its applications, what is crucial is not that technical ability, but it is imagination in all of its applications. The ability to form concepts with images of entities and processes pictured by intuition. I found out that advances in science rarely come upstream from an ability to stand at a blackboard and conjure images from unfolding mathematical propositions and equations. They are instead the products of downstream imagination leading to hard work, during which mathematical reasoning may or may not prove to be relevant. Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.

In other words, man’s need to see the science is empowered by human imagination.  It’s the entity that allows us to visualize and understand the differing elements that exist in reality.

Here’s the full video of Wilson’s talk, an excellent piece that covers far more than science and imagination.